Lavrov said there was no need for Russia to withdraw from UNESCO

There is no need for Russia to withdraw from UNESCO (a special UN agency for education, science and culture, which includes sites in the list of World Heritage Sites), so Moscow is fighting the bias of the organization from within. On January 27, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this during the filming of the movie "UNESCO. 70 years in Russia".

"I believe that there is no need to withdraw from UNESCO. It is necessary to fight this absolutely biased, unacceptable attitude on the part of the secretariat from within. This is what we are doing: we are requesting information. The Secretariat has no right not to respond to requests from member countries. When the answers to these requests come in the form of formal replies, we make this situation public," he said in an interview with the TV channel "Culture.

Separately, the head of the agency recalled that last year the UNESCO Secretariat issued a report on the fate of journalists working in hot spots. It included cases when war correspondents became victims of shelling and were killed.

"There is not a single name of Russian journalists in it, although we regularly informed the relevant structures of the secretariat about the death of each of them, first of all in the zone of special military operation. Now we have sent an official request asking for an explanation," the Minister emphasized.

Before that, on December 13, 2024, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the agency disapproved of the report of UNESCO Director General Audre Azoulay on the safety of journalists, in which she did not mention the names of journalists from Russia. The diplomat said that in this way the West had only exposed itself.

Earlier, on November 29, Lavrov noted that UNESCO Director General Azoulay is complicit in the information war against Russia, and "by and large, against the truth." Before that, on November 13, Zakharova also pointed out that UNESCO ignores the Kiev regime's crimes against Russian journalists.